Can An Uprising Of Love Counter The Gaslighting of America?

Love as resistance. Love as actionable honesty.

02/15/2017 10:25 am ETUpdated
Feb 15, 2017

BRYAN R. SMITH via Getty Images

What does it mean to stand in righteous community? During the first month of this new administration, it has meant standing with signs that read “you are welcome here,” marching alongside strangers while calling in unison “show me what democracy looks like,” and together responding, “this is what democracy looks like.” It’s getting and staying woke to the reality that democracy ― and it’s promise of governing by “we, the people,” is a practice. It is a practice taking the form of marching, chanting, voting, litigating, bearing witness, showing up, staying woke, and insisting that representative government be neither passive in its actual representation, nor aggressive in its undermining of the equality it is meant to unrelentingly instill and impart. It is a practice that doesn’t allow us to choose some of our rights, over all of our rights. And it is a practice that will succeed and thrive if it stands steadfast in the radical notion of love.

As a collective, we are resisting, not for spite or hate of this current administration; but instead because we choose to know better, to do better, to be better and love better than the barrage of policies coming down trying to divide us and deny our collective humanity.

The sweeping changes in conduct and content, policy and practice, all with considerable implication for our daily lives, is overwhelming. Each Executive Order, the onslaught of tweets aimed at targets as wide as our entire judiciary, or as oddly specific as Nordstrom, the constant calling out of any media critique as fake – requires us to be ever mindful of this purposeful chaos. The scrutiny required to discern the accuracy of this information, and the voracity with which “common sense” has been gaslighted and become untethered, requires daily vigilance.

And yet not only must we persist, we do. We are. All kinds of people are showing up in record number and taking a public stand on so many issues at once. People are asking how we are going to beat this, to get “our country back,” to win.

First, I don’t think we are going to get our country back. Just like I rebuke making it great again. I do think, we have a very real opportunity, to create this country, in its own image, for all of us, for the first time. We have an opportunity to move from rhetoric to reality - to heal some of the very real ills that have been plaguing the United States since its inception because of the contradictions upon which it was built.

We are a country that was built on the backs and bloodshed of Native people and enslaved Africans. While our history books continue to erase this reality by minimizing the brutal effects of democracy-built-on-slavery, we know better. Standing in this truth and owning it, means loving truth however horrific, however contradictory. Denying our national truths have only served to foster perpetual systemic oppression and violence. We must not only heal as a nation but design a future and governance that needn’t strip any of us of our humanity or equality in order to continually veil us from the truth. What will make it possible? It will not be any policy that requires the ugliness of race hatred, an extreme wealth gap, turning corporations into people, or legalizing some of our bodies while criminalizing others.

The only thing that will allow us to make this critical course correction as a nation is: Love. Love as resistance. Love as actionable honesty. In order for us to succeed, we must be able to stand together in our differences, learn from each other, build trust, and synchronize strategies. Practicing these components of love, is the only way we will ensure the best outcome for this democratic experiment we call America.

We would not march in the streets and at airports or have walkouts from schools if we weren’t stepping out with love and belief in the tenets of democracy. Resistance is an act of love. The willingness to place our bodies in line with our values to stand against oppression by any means necessary—whether taking water cannons to the face to protect all of our right to clean water; or suffering the bruises of batons and tear gas to protect our right to exist black and free, or love who we love, or have autonomy over our own body, or ensure our children can access a free and excellent education regardless of their zip code— we do so to truly enact our greatest participatory democratic possibility. This love resistance posture is the alignment of our collective hope.

Activist, author and all-around badass Angela Davis once said, “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change, I am changing the things I cannot accept.” Some of us have had to fight for our rights for quite a long time. Some of us are just being called to action. But whatever day you come into your consciousness, it is a good day.

We do not need a more urgent moment than now for an unabashed and radical form of love like the display we saw at the Women’s March or countless protests over the past few weeks all over the globe —this persistent vigilance and unrelenting belief in the formation of a better and more reflective union is how we will continue to resist, organize and stand in our truth. This is our moment to seize; this is our uprising of love.

This week the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice is launching their first ever Uprising Fund to bring emergency funding to their existing LGBTQI grantees that are working on the frontlines of the resistance movement enhancing digital security, holistic security, migrant justice and more.